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I want inner peace. I want love. I wanted the experience of being a woman in Abaya; I choose to do it for 21 days. I wore the garment as an artistic experience. I am an artist. Here's what i found out....

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Abaya can be a fashion garment and some women have 30 or more abayas in their closet. Wafaa explained that women like to show off their new clothes, no matter where they live. But in Saudi Arabia, when you go out of the house, it’s not realistic to think you will have opportunity to show off your new jeans and a blouse--but you can show off your new abaya.

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I spent the afternoon in Ivy Leagued Harvard Square--mostly in the Harvard College quadrangle--hoping I might get smarter by osmosis, just by strolling among the elite, the gifted, and the buildings that house extraordinary collections of books, and visiting the Out of Town Newsstand.

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During the past 16 days many people have asked why I am not covering my hair when I am wearing the abaya and the veil. I thought it might be interesting to bring in an expert: the wonderful and lovely Saudi woman who is mentoring me during the abaya project.

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Since today is the anniversary of the Saudi Arabia's royal decree allowing the government to issue drivers license to women, and I'm in Watkins Glen (car racing capital) , it is also a good day to pay tribute to a woman’s right to drive her own car; say what she needs to say; stand up for herself and her country.

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Not many people know much about Muslim women and their garments. Most of us think it is an ancient way to dress. In fact it is not. The outfit I am wearing, and the full black ‘cage’ is a new fashion in Middle East. Prior to the late 70s, early 80s women were not required to wear the body covering garment. They might wear head covering as simple as a scarf and dressed modestly. The change came when the religious fundamental cleric class made the laws regarding women’s clothing.

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During my subway ride, a woman stared at me as if i were an insect. When I got up to leave she followed my movement out with her eyes and even turned around and looked at me through the window as the train pulled away, as if she wanted to be sure I was gone.

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Today, at the subway station, had to deal with the logistics of wearing abaya--like how to keep hem clean, how not to get it caught in the elevator steps and how to hold onto the veil when its slip sliding off the head.

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Our instincts push us towards the comfortable. And I think that seeking to be comfortable can be dangerous. I am an artist, and a good one. If I stayed in a comfort zone, I might be making a different kind of art, a polite art. That’s not my intention: there are enough people doing nice art. I’d rather provoke thinking rather than feeling.

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You just can’t keep a girl away from her tools and her power of observation. It's really hitting home that people don’t pay much attention to what’s going on around them. I suppose this human condition is what criminals, terrorists, and cheaters count on: operating in the realm of other’s unawareness.

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I went to an Open House for a $2.4 million Cambridge property near Harvard University. The back page of the 10-page brochure that the agents handed out to visitors featured a quote from T.S. Eliot “Home is Where One Starts From.” I wore my abaya.

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When a woman in an Abaya is seen on the street with a man let’s assume everyone figures he is related to her and that the man is Muslim...and if he is Muslim, he is the person who has requested his wife, daughter, sister cover her body in public.

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I stated Day 3 feeling a bit like an interloper until two women said "excuse me" in Arabic as they brushed past me and their polite, expressed respect, and kindness made me cowgirl-up, shifting my mood.

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In the market On Day 2 Woman in Abaya the artist experienced that she was not invisible, that men noticed her as a human not as a sexual object, women looked sideways at her and that most people didn't look at all since they were involved with their cell phones.

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“Vestal Virgin Vest #1” , cover art for INTERIM, a poetry and poetics journal, began as a plaster body cast made over a woman’s torso and from there went through a multi-layered process of becoming a 3-D sculpture that was flattened and then stitched .

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Boston artist Charlene Liska's video and photography are on exhibit at Silent. Silence. Silenced during the month of November; the sound of her voice casts strong shadows that challenge our questions about the future and what we might choose to make or take from the video screen.

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Artist takes the reader through the steps in artistic process: going from Greek Goddess of Victory, which was an investigation of antiquity vs. modern life; to hearing news about the silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren in the US Senate; to sewing Nike's lips shut; to dropping a black hood over the head of the goddess and exploring the silencing effect of a black hood.

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When I was artist-in-residence in the town of Otranto, Italy, I became intensely attracted to the Ottoman weapons (Cannonballs everywhere!) perhaps because my father and uncles had been in the armed service by the sea--Iwo Gima, Siege of Rome, Battle of Dunkirk, the Philippines-- and this combination of sensations and memories called me to make art from the weapons.

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The bombards, cast from bronze, hurled huge stone balls, weighing up to 1,500 pounds, several miles. After one shot, the barrel had to be cooled in oil to be fired again. The cooling process took over two hour and was frustratingly slow.

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It was a conceptual idea that lead the artist to cast the cannonballs form the 1480 Ottoman siege of Otranto Castle: to embrace not only the texture of the cannonball but also to capture the essence of the weapon, the energy embedded within the material, and to transfer that energy into her sculptures

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Being at the Taj Mahal was like walking over the surface of a postcard or being folded inside the interior of a book because the experience is an out-of-body one in the way that the visuals are extraordinarily familiar yet illusatory. I've never seen such precise symmetry.

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In India Beauty Parlors for Women are experiencing growth. Men are much more public about their grooming, often doing it on the street and women don't color their hair nearly as much as the men. A visitor will notice many more grey-haired women than gray-haired men.

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As I wait for the 2017 eclipse, I recall the Jantar Mantar Astronomy Court in Jaipur, India, and by coincidence BING's homepage featured a photo from the same courtyard, a magical place for seeing the movement of stars and planets in shadow reveal.

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In 1968, The Beatles went to Rishikesh to study with Mahrishi Mahesh Yogi and the trip got widespread media attention and influenced Western attitudes about Indian spirituality and music; I went there 40 years later and couldn't wait to get out of town!

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In India monkeys run around the backyard, jumping in trees, like squirrels do in New England. Anjula told me a story about when a pack of monkeys broke into their family house in Dehradun. The family dropped everything, scrambled together... Continue Reading →

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Dehradun is known as the love city,the jewel of the Himalayas, gateway to holy cities, education capital of India; for me Dehradun was the first Indian city I got to know. It is about 6 hours north of Delhi.

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On July 4, Anjula and I flew to Delhi together. At the airport a man picked up her suitcase by mistake and Anjula had to take a 5 hour bus ride west to retrieve it. This was my first expose to the man/woman imbalance in India. The man would have never gone out of his way to return the suitcase. It was the woman's duty to shoulder the burden of inconvenience.